Retailers and merchants involved in electronic commerce often do not offer live support or salespeople to help customers in purchasing decisions. Instead, a customer typically attempts to identify a product that meets the customer's needs based on information such as product descriptions, reviews, etc. Even a customer with considerable experience or knowledge regarding a category of products or services sometimes experiences difficulty in choosing a product from among tens or hundreds of similar products. For novice customers, meanwhile, the task of selecting from among a group of related products can be unproductive and even frustrating.
In response to these difficulties, retailers continually strive to make it easier for customers to research products and receive information that may assist in purchasing decisions. One way to improve a customer's experience includes providing discussion forums (or discussion boards) that allow customers to exchange information with other people via dialogue in a discussion. The ever-enlarging product catalog makes discussion forums helpful when a customer tries to distinguish between products, seek out impartial advice, learn more about a product or category, or obtain other information. A merchant with a large catalog of products may offer a large number of different discussion forums on a variety of topics, which may range from very specific topics to general ones. Some forums may be more active and have a greater frequency of responses than other forums. Thus, a customer may ask a question in a discussion forum that is not the most appropriate forum for receiving an answer, or that is not frequently viewed by users who may be able to provide an answer to the question. Accordingly, at any given time, one or more discussion forums may include an unanswered question from a customer.